Share

Trending Discussions

This Week In Energy: Tech, Retail Sectors Banking On Renewables

The lion’s share of debate about the progress of renewable energy is missing an important dimension. It seems that the media, banks and NGOs largely value the worth of each renewable source by their rate of adoption at the national and international level. These measurements seem to rely on macro-economic indicators or on agreements such as that made last week by the U.S. and China. However, the efforts of private corporations to go green, while not wholly unnoticed, do not seem to weigh in. It would make no sense in most other industries to measure their health purely by public efforts. In fact, many renewable energy developers today are seeking to change their industry’s reputation as being dependent on government subsidies and costly to the taxpayer with little return. One way to fight this reputation is to show concrete evidence of global corporations going renewable. This week has given plenty of evidence of just that, with IKEA, Google and Amazon all making real commitments.

Back in March, IKEA acquired the Hoopeston wind farm in Illinois, which is set to produce more than enough energy to power all its stores and distribution stores in the country. 65% more. But this energy will not be sent to IKEA’s stores, instead, the Swedish retailer will sell it off as part of a strategy to offset its entire consumption by 2020. This week, an ever bigger announcement came. IKEA has purchased a 165MW wind farm in Cameron County, Texas, marking “the single largest renewable energy investment made by the IKEA Group globally to date.” IKEA goes on to say that it will invest $1.9 billion in renewables by the end of 2015.

Where IKEA is investing in renewables to offset its energy usage, Google and Amazon are doing so for a far more practical reason: data centers have incredibly high energy consumption and renewable projects can be a good way to reduce that burden. To power its new 600 million euro data center at Eemshaven in the Netherlands, Google has agreed to buy a wind farm being built by Eneco near Eemshaven. The 19-turbine 62MW wind farm will power the data center from day one, and comes on the heels of Google buying two other wind farms in Sweden to provide for its data center in Finland.

Other tech and retail leaders are making forays in the same direction, albeit with less emphasis. After being slammed on Greenpeace’s ranking of the green track records of IT leaders, Amazon seems to want to become more sustainable. Amazon Web Services, responsible for cloud computing, stated that it was taking a “long-term commitment to achieve 100 percent renewable energy usage for our global infrastructure footprint.” Unlike Google and IKEA, though, Amazon has not stated any outright investments it is planning on making. It will likely take years for Amazon to become fully renewable, but even doing so for its cloud computing needs would be a major achievement, given how the likes of Pinterest, Netflix and Spotify rely on Amazon’s cloud.

On the negative side of the equation, Walmart is slipping backwards, having used renewables for 3 percent of its energy needs in 2013, as opposed to 4 percent in 2011. Although long identifying itself in its corporate branding as a green leader, a new think tank has revealed that Walmart is relying on coal for 40% of its energy needs in the U.S. This is a particularly damning accusation since Walmart’s stores use more power than Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont combined, according to the report. Walmart immediately rebutted the report, saying it gets 24 percent of its electricity from renewable energy sources—and that it would “expand its renewable energy projects and procurement to reach 7 billion kilowatt-hours of wind, solar, hydroelectric and biogas globally by 2020, up from 2.2 billion kilowatt-hours today.”

Whether companies are making quantifiable commitments to renewables or are fudging the statistics to look sustainable, it is becoming increasingly nonsensical to weigh up the value of renewable energy sources through public investment alone.

For more from OilPrice’s analysis, check out our Premium newsletter which covers a lot of ground this week as we look at oil growth in West Africa, why an underperforming solar company may still prove to be a wise investment, and how crude oil futures are beginning to level out as we near an OPEC production decision.

Urgent Note: Our trader, Dan Dicker has put together a very important report where he has constructed an investment strategy that can be used for the duration of the $80 oil winter. For those of you looking to take advantage of the current environment in oil stocks or to protect yourself from further downside Dan’s report is a must read and you can receive it for Free – just click here and start a 30 day free trial to Oilprice Premium.

Leave a comment

That email address is already in the database. Please login to your account to post your comment, or enter a different email address to continue with your comment & account creation.

Captcha

Comment

Please understand that, by submitting this form, you will be creating a free OilPrice.com account, and therefore agree to abide by our Terms of Use. Your details will be stored in our database and shared with our third party mailing list provider. You will be sent an email containing a link that will ask you to generate a new password - please follow the link to complete your OilPrice account activation.

We will save the information entered above in our website. Your comment will then await moderation from one of our team. If approved, your data will then be publically viewable on this article. Please confirm you understand and are happy with this and our privacy policy by ticking this box. You can withdraw your consent, or ask us to give you a copy of the information we have stored, at any time by contacting us.